Spokane County cops arrested three professional criminals today in Bonner County. These three are likely the culprits in at least two dozen burglaries here.

Phelps and Davis are jailed in Bonner County after being arrested there Friday. Davis reportedly told a detective they had moved north and were afraid to burglarize homes in Spokane County because of the recent surge in property crime arrests here.

Pro criminals always know the odds of capture. That's the critical variable, not the length of jail terms.

Sheriff Knezovich won't need any campaign slogans next year; he can just point to the dust trails of criminals getting out of Dodge.

Uncommon Descent is arguing that universities aren't supposed to provide useful skills and knowledge. Instead, universities are supposed to provide "meaning", whatever that is. For some reason I've never understood, conservatives often hold this peculiar view.

As Camus puts it in The Myth of Sisyphus, whether the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way, is a matter of profound irrelevance to the meaning of life. If it did so determine meaning then we would not be free. There is no ought from is.

Absolute word salad. Utterly devoid of substance.

First, author is applying logic to what he calls "meaning", in order to "prove" that logic has no correlation with "meaning". After you say that the "meaning of life" can't be computed, don't try to compute it!

Second, nobody is really looking for "meaning", whatever that is. College students are looking for STATUS and CONNECTION because they're teenagers. Adolescence is the time when you try to establish your position in the hierarchy and make connections with higher-status people.

Third, there's no earthly reason to assume that the job of a university is to provide "meaning", whatever that is. Universities traditionally satisfied the needs of privileged adolescents, providing a controlled situation where connections could be made and position established. They still do the same thing, though we define privilege in a slightly different way now. It's still purely a matter of inheritance, but we don't use old titles like Duke or Countess. Instead we use new titles like First Nations or African-American or LGBT2Q.

This morning some UN thingamajig is quietly and calmly convicting Liberian leader Charles Taylor of "crimes" for giving moral, monetary and military support to a rebel group that went wild and committed atrocities.

Another "successful" implementation of the non-existent concept of "international law". Another motivation for hard-ass dictators to stay in power at all costs.

Meanwhile in Syria and Libya, rebel groups are going wild, committing atrocities of the same kind that Taylor encouraged. The same UN types are giving moral, monetary and military support to these rebels.

I guess this makes sense to the "minds" of Western elites, but it doesn't make a lick of fucking sense to humans.

Well, what about Greece? Internal violence, excesses on the Left and persecution on the Right. Even a freely accepted and efficient government could not restore order without massive outside help, but successive Greek governments have been inept, inefficient and corrupt. The civil service has been purged of all non-partisan competent bureaucrats; this is one reason why tax collections have been slow, and few people buy government bonds. Inflation is rife and black markets rampant. So, to the other Europeans, it must have seemed that they were pouring money into a bottomless trough. Our government sent a small payment to Greece with a warning that they must put their financial house in order if they wanted more. A United Nations commission was sent to Greece and is stuck in an endless chain of testimony. Half-hearted attempts to restore a functional government have led to a coalition led by an ex-banker.

Whoopsie! I lied! This is from March 1947, on NBC's Story Behind the Headlines.

We wouldn't be surprised by this if we weren't stupefied by the false Marxist view of humans as Identical and Changeable. We assume all humans are simple passive linear mechanisms like grains of sand. People have no distinct or lasting characteristics; all of us simply respond in the same way to changing external forces. If you want to change behavior, you change the external forces.

None of that is true. In fact humans are Different and Constant. When you truly understand how one person works, or how one culture works, you can predict its unique behavior in broad strokes over a very long period. Details and fashions may change [IF the permanent characteristics of this person or culture include a willingness to change details and fashions!], but basic responses don't.

I check the sitemeter stats every day, mostly to see whether anyone at all is reading. Usually the answer is no, except for predictable random stuff and the useless clicknapper links. I'm not surprised by this any more.

What does surprise me this season: Nobody is even looking for comments about Romney. I've said some thoroughlynastythingsandcartoonsabouthim this year, which should come up easily in searches for "romney vulture". Nope, not one indication of a search.

Wasn't the same in 2008. I said some equally nasty things about Manchurian Candidate McCain, Ho's favorite ho. Those things were noticed by searchers, in an expectable quantity.

Has all the political discussion moved to Twitter? Or is everyone robotically locked into the two "parties", with no need to see any positive or negative comments? If the latter, both "parties" are wasting a lot of money on advertising.

Love to hear the sounds of Carbon Cultists screaming in cognitive-dissonance pain. They were SO CLOSE ... they had absolutely all the power on their side. All western governments, all post-Christian "churches", all "scientists", all schools and universities, all the Satanic media. They had it all. And now it's dissolving in their hands like cotton candy. Nature is teaching them how Nature really works, but of course they won't learn. They're finally getting their own direct personal taste of the LIMITS TO GROWTH and they hate it.

Latest episode of BBC's "Our endangered fragile suffering dying Planet [pbuh] which we MUST MUST MUST save by killing everybody but us" is beauty to my ears. The wailing and gnashing of teeth as ecowacks try to imagine their future without INFINITE POWER AND INFINITE STATUS. How will they ever live?

First half of the program is an attempt to cover up the IPCC's obvious mistakes about glaciers, or Glassy-Ahs as the Brits say. Basically it doesn't matter that half of the Glassy-Ahs are growing and half are shrinking, as you'd expect from good old balance-loving Nature. We MUST somehow prove that the growing Glassy-Ahs are meaningless and only the shrinking Glassy-Ahs count.

Most of the program was quotes from various participants in a conference of envirowacks held blasphemously in the fine old ex-church of St Martin in the Fields.

"One thing that I'm particularly interested in, is whether Ecocide can be made a crime against peace..."

"We're all going to have to eat less meat if we're going to do something about climate change."

"The objective that we have today is the same as 20 years ago, but the urgency is magnified. The issues can't stay low on the agenda. We have to get them to the top."

"We've got a small window of opportunity still. It's diminishing... and governments have given up on sustainable development. They're doing the minimum. They're pretending to negotiate. With these exhibitions we have a way to reach lots of voters ... and we hope they'll find a way to show that there are votes in sustainable development. ... Turning ordin'ry people into campaigners, because if we don't do that, [governments] aren't going to act."

Announcer: It's not working. It's time to give up, isn't it? [Said in a suitably ironic tone, but nevertheless it's the first sane thing ever heard from an ecowack!]

"No, we're both in it until our voices are not listened to at all."

Announcer: Do you expect to be back at this conference two years from now?

"I really do not know. I've been giving careful thought, and I don't think I can do anything beyond this exhibition."

Go ahead, wack. Commit your own suicide. Be honest. Stop forcing the rest of us to commit suicide for your benefit. We've already impoverished ourselves for YOUR enrichment, and thousands of people have already died for YOUR glory. They're starving because YOUR biofuel plants stole their farms, and they're freezing because YOUR wind "power" stole their money.

Pick up the carbon-free razor and do it now, you grotesque evil mass-slaughtering monsters!

My morning walks follow a limited variety of routes, always passing by the neighborhood's "locus of decay" in one direction or another. Not sure why; the abandoned two-story apartment is the least attractive thing in the area. Maybe I'm hoping to encourage improvement by giving it positive attention. Or something like that.

After a super-rainy spring the untended grass and plants have made the place even more ruinous.

Until today.

Usually Nature increases entropy and humans try to fight entropy with beauty. This time it's the other way around!
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Artistic note: Love it when Serendipity pops in for a visit. The tearstains under Mr Sun's eyes in the first two frames weren't intentional. They're just shadows made by his eyeballs. I moved the light in the third frame to brighten up everything, and the shadows disappeared. Didn't notice the effect until all the renders were done.

Supposedly we learn the facts of life from the birds and the bees. I doubt thatanyone really uses that analogy, but now I'm wondering if the birds have learned something from the bees.

As I was heading for the door to take out the trash, I heard a noisy gathering of Default Brown Birds on the porch. I stopped behind the screen door; luckily the birds were too busy to notice me.

Default Brown Bird 1 was on the porch making all the noise. Birds 2 and 3 were on the first step, watching Bird 1 intently. The illustrated action was happening repeatedly, in a nearly invariant loop. Bird 1 CHEEPED while vibrating his wings; then Birds 2 and 3 touched beaks with Bird 1 for a couple seconds. I couldn't see any food; looked more like a transfer of information.

Reminds me of the way bees are supposed to tell each other where the good stuff is found. Were the birds doing something similar, or is this more of a mating dance?

Radio Australia interrupted its normal all-CARBON programming for a slightly realistic feature on Chicago's gang violence. The reportrix allowed us to hear several locals who were making a good solid point: "Why are we supposed to be protesting this ONE shooting in Florida by a white man, when Chicago had 400 black people killed last year by other blacks?"

After hearing an actual fact, the reportrix managed to miss the point entirely, returning to the standard Satanist shit about residual racism.

The solution is not easy but it is available. As always, previous experience is the guide.

Chicago and other cities weren't always centers of violence. What was different in the less violent years? (1) Industrial jobs. (2) Dignity.

How do we bring back the jobs? (1) Cut off all connections with China and shoot any corporate traitor who tries to restore them. (2) Eliminate the EPA, which has placed huge obstacles in the path of industries returning to big cities. [See Environmental Justice, Brownfield, Superfund.] (3) Eliminate teachers unions and replace all existing Federal mandates with one big pay-for-play mandate: Serve local interests. Subsidize every school that actually prepares its actual students for actual jobs they can actually do.

How do we bring back the dignity? To some extent it will take care of itself when the jobs return. When young men find they can do something USEFUL and make MONEY by doing it, the young women will see them as good mates, and the gangs will lose their appeal as sources of money and appreciation.

My guess: this automatic return of dignity will happen quickly among black people, because their women have not been corrupted and stupefied by feminism. The forces of religion and civilization are still strong under the surface.

I'm not nearly as hopeful for white youngsters, who have been more deeply "modernized", more completely trepanned and lobotomized by Satanist-Stalinist idiocy.= = = = =For more background on the correct approach to jobs, see Social Economics. American industrialists and economists figured out the right way to do things around 1900. The countries that have continued in that tradition (eg Germany, Turkey, Korea) are still successful. When we abandoned these principles in the 1970's, we guaranteed our failure.

Much as I hate partisan hacks, if I had to choose between a corrupt party hack and a sanctimonious Good Government busybody, I'd keep the hack. Commercial politicians like Blagojevich may not be honest but they're obvious and direct. Blago doesn't claim to be doing anything holy or eternally blessed, while the GG busybody does. This gives GG a level of fanatical energy that the hacks can't match, and it also gives him immunity from criticism by the press.

When you give a prosecuting license to the GG type, civilization collapses.

Competent government requires a fair amount of corruption. Chicago works better than most cities because it's openly fueled by the Mafia. Fitzgerald and similar GGs think they can strip out the money and leave something pure and noble called "public service". Nope, it just doesn't work that way.

Rather amazingly, the media are doing their proper job. Every day the case gets weaker and weaker. Looks like the "victim" was a prostitute who wanted to get revenge on some of the people she dealt with. Many of those people are involved in drugs and prostitution ... they're hardly innocent bystanders ... but the story of a "sex trafficking" ring is falling apart.

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Update 5/29: The cops have released the "trafficking" suspects. Prosecutor is slowly backing away from charges, as always. Unlike the criminals we put in jail, the criminals we call "prosecutors" never confess, never reform, never admit guilt. They are permanently and irredeemably evil.

Formerly meant ranking the items on a list according to importance. The direct object of prioritize was a list or agenda. Now it means to place this item as #1 on the priority list. The direct object is the top item, not the list.

From an NWS forecast discussion:"At this point I`ve just raised PoPs for the Panhandle and southeast WA, not completely buying into the latest runs yet. The ECMWF gives us a one day event, as much of the Pacific trough dives into the desert Southwest as a cut off low. And this seems perfectly legit."

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Hail Mary:

Obviously not new, but an odd repeated usage in one specific case. Prof P has heard several media reports about the trial of some priest or bishop in Philadelphia. Each time the reporter said that the defense tactic of calling the defendant to testify was a "Hail Mary". If nothing else this shows the complete disconnect between religion and the Satanist media; they don't realize that Hail Mary had a meaning before football.

Removing the football stuff, it's an accidentally perfect explanation. Rome constantly falls into gross corruption because it constantly practices a corrupt form of forgiveness. Say 100 Hail Marys and you're forgiven. Other religions don't play that game. Serious Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and fundamentalist Protestants believe God means what he says. Obey or else. Only Catholics think they can sneak out of punishment by paying money or saying words.

American idiots are complaining about Pakistan prosecuting the doctor who helped us find Sheikh Osama.

As usual America is insane and Pakistan is sane. When you help a hostile power, that's treason by all normal rules of nations. We're not entitled to complain.

As usual American idiots are intentionally failing to mention the real problem.

Real problem: It's also a normal rule of intel operations that you protect a foreigner after he's turned traitor to help you. CIA had a solemn duty to protect this doctor who risked his life and freedom to help CIA. They should have pulled him into America and given him a new identity, or whatever else seemed necessary.

CIA failed in its normal duty. Now the doctor is in jail for life, and any Paki who might have been thinking about helping CIA will stop thinking about it.

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Note for clarity: I'm NOT saying that killing Osama was a bad thing. In fact it was the only good and necessary thing this miserable country has done in response to 9/11. It's the one thing we should have done FIRST instead of endlessly fucking around in random countries. I'm only saying that CIA missed an important detail in carrying out the operation.

A major rich foundation with a Hollywood name has declared that it's not going to put any more money into stem cell research. The Parkinson's foundation associated with Michael J. Fox says that they've been exploring this line long enough with no meaningful results, and they'll be focusing elsewhere from now on.

Good. Mere facts change nothing. When cool people with Hollywood connections and lots of money change their minds, everything changes.

It's been clear from the start that embryonic stem cells were nothing more than a way to justify killing babies. American "scientists" forged ahead with vigah on ESC because they love to kill babies, and ESPECIALLY because the partial prohibition on such research had the Bush name on its label.

Now that the restrictions in America have been eased, and now that all regulations have Obama on their label, it's no longer cool to taunt the regulators.

American "scientists" may actually have to start doing actual science with actual results, but I'm not holding my breath. It's more likely that sane Chinese and Russian scientists will continue to get the real results.

Here's a perfect example of the __________ that inhabits the brain cavities of our elites. I've run out of English words to describe __________ because it's simply beyond anything that can be conceptualized by normal humans. Might come close with "insanity beyond evil beyond lunacy beyond idiocy beyond Satanism multiplied by genocide to the infiniti-eth power."

This item is actually 2010 news, and the monsters have only grown worse since then.

New Zealand newscaster Paul Henry, one of the tiny handful of genuinely funny entertainers, got in trouble for PRONOUNCING THE NAME OF A FOREIGNER CORRECTLY. The foreigner in question was an Indian female diplomat named Sheila Dikshit. Henry pronounced the name as spelled and had some fun with it. His coworkers demonstrated the standard elite ____________ by instantly "correcting" Paul; they flatly and stupidly insisted that "diksit" was correct. The usual demands for a billion apologies ensued; Henry didn't feel like apologizing for telling the truth; he resigned.

In fact the lady herself pronounces it "dikshit" as spelled. Not surprising; the "ksh" combination is common in Hindi, as it was in Sanskrit.

But that didn't matter. The elites know what's correct this week, and what the elites know is ALWAYS opposite to the truth. Telling any microscrap of truth, or using any picosmidgen of logic, will destroy you.

There. Got 'er done. Deadline was two weeks, and it actually took 5 days. Now I can loosen up and spend a few days combing through the result, to be sure I didn't create more damage while fixing the previous damage.

I'm not proud of the code in its present condition. The original was well-written and powerful, with spare capabilities that weren't used by the released content. As I adapted it to commercial courseware and revised it three times, the code gradually got simpler and clunkier, and the content used even less of the available resources. At this point there's no reason to clean it up. The next iteration won't use the executable at all; it will somehow fit the text and animations into an online platform-independent buzzword-compliant HTML5 setup. So the formerly elegant, now seedy C++ code will be allowed to crumble.

AEI has clearly jumped all possible sharks. Few weeks ago two of their Comrades put out a book glorifying the Carbon Cult nonsense, calling Republicans "anti-science" for attempting to assert facts about CO2 and evolution. (Of course the accusation is wildly misplaced to begin with, since 99% of Repooflicans in office are either active Soviet agents or passive pansies on these questions. The only exception is the heroic James Inhofe.)

Now Arthur Brooks gives an NPR interview in which he's supposedly showing that the "free-market" model is more moral than the opposite. And again he stoutly defends the anti-science anti-civilization anti-factual ratshit of the Cult, defends all wacked-out pseudotheories and smashes all facts.

Sorry, Comrade Art. If you want to be "moral" you have to start with facts. If you want to be "moral" you have to start with good logic and good science. Most of all, if you want to be "moral" you CANNOT take the same side as genocidal mass murderers. You CANNOT follow the same path as Margaret Mead and James Hansen and Michael Mann.

What you are, Art, is just another Wall Street dickhead, a pitiable court jester for the inbred cretinous nobility. If it's profitable for Goldman it's moral. If it's profitable for Morgan Chase it's moral. If it's profitable for the money-changers in the temple, it's moral.

And the Carbon Cult is unquestionably good for Goldman ... at the moment ... though I suspect the foundations are crumbling. When the profit margin declines enough, I'm sure your "moral" sense will change to fit the fashion of the Satanic aristocracy.

I never take note of Sports figures, but this one sort of touches home. Bob Boozer started his career in 1959 at K-State, where my father was teaching. Boozer was in one of my father's classes, and for some unknown reason he visited our house once. Possibly my father was tutoring him.

I remember a VEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRY TAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL man walking through the house and reaching down from the clouds to shake my hand. He had to duck under every doorway, barely cleared the ceiling.

He seemed shy and polite and mature, unlike the usual rambunctious college boys. According to the obits he remained a shy and polite man, except when playing ball.

Looks like Ching Chong Ching Chong or whatever is leaving China to settle in New York.

Should be interesting to watch. If he continues agitating against abortion here in the US, he'll end up in jail again just like Randall Terry... and the US version of jail won't be house arrest. Our alleged "government" has only a few permanent principles, one of which is ABORTION IS A HOLY SACRAMENT. We don't cotton kindly to heretics who think that murdering babies is wrong.

If Ching etc holds to his principles, the reaction of our superstatus ruling class will be even more interesting. Cognitive dissonance or Unperson? Will some of them notice the contradiction in their attitudes? Bet against it, bet on Unperson.

A lot like Solzhenitsyn. Our media and ruling class agitated to pull him out of Russia; he spent 20 years in the West, mostly in Vermont. He expressed a mild liking for the town-meeting tradition of Vermont, but generally hated the West for the same valid reasons he'd hated the USSR. He had principles, so our ruling class decided to Unperson him. Finally in '94 he went back to Russia.

Fine example of the idiocy that results when you don't think in terms of feedback and cycles, when your mind can only imagine linear extrapolations and rigid couplings.

One of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented sheds light on how human disturbance of the natural world may lead to widespread, yet largely invisible, disruption of ecosystems.

Through analysis ...... the researchers showed that replacing native trees with non-native palms led to about five times fewer roosting seabirds (they seemed to dislike palms' simple and easily wind-swayed canopies), which led to fewer bird droppings to fertilize the soil below, fewer nutrients washing into surrounding waters, smaller and fewer plankton in the water and fewer hungry manta rays cruising the coastline.

Such a complex ecosystem cascade prompted the researchers to warn of the fragility of nature's unrecognized interplays.

Nonsense. Seeds get transported between islands all the time by those same birds, and by wind and water and bugs. Different trees try to grow in different places all the time. Despite those disruptions, which have been happening for millions of years, the manta rays and the birds are still around. Why are they still around? Because they are able to "cruise" a different coastline when the pickings get slim on one island. Because animals can explore new territory directly, and plants can send out seeds to explore new territory in the next generation. Because they're ALIVE, goddammit.

If nature worked in the rigid and dead way these "researchers" think it does, all of these animals and plants would have died millions of years ago, and there wouldn't be any humans to "research" anything. Nature would in fact be rigid and dead.
In other words: The existence of "scientists" proves that the "scientists" are wrong. If they were right, they wouldn't exist.

Going to be working pretty solidly for a couple of weeks, so won't be writing much here. Publisher finally got around to testing and proofing the revised courseware that I sent in early March. It's always hurry-up-and-wait with these folks.

The corrections are mostly 'stylebook' stuff ... they want Words, On Buttons, to be Capitalized; they want, Lots of Commas, and, so, on. Oops... even the title above is wrong. By their stylebook, "a while" should be "awhile", which isn't aword.Oh Well. Shouldn't Complain; the Pay, is, Good.

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Update: Got the routine 'stylebook' stuff done in three days; now to dig into the more serious programming problems.....

On the exceedingly rare occasions where Satan dba "media" gets something right, I should note it. The Facebook stock offering is one of those rare moments. Both "left" and "right" are raising yellow flags about the bubblicious nature of Facebook. NPR, normally a willing slave of Wall Street, has done an actual experiment to see if Facebook advertising works, and finds that it mostly doesn't.

Even if this coverage is actually intended to push the price down for some short-seller's benefit, it's still good advice to ordinary investors.

During the booms of the '90s and '00s, all media conspired to get everyone buying; only native caution and common sense would keep you out of the market. Now we have a little bit of common sense seeping out of TVs and radios, and that's a step forward!

Here's a well-told story about smart human farmers who developed a smart technology to take advantage of a dumb bee to pollinate an AMAZINGLY smart plant, leading to a unique agricultural niche product. Yet another brick added to the huge "This Can't Be Random" structure.

The best part is that a human government is actually respecting the hard-won knowledge and experience of the smart farmers!

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Here's a video by a bee expert showing how the alfalfa works. I remember fiddling with this mechanism on sweetpeas and snapdragons when I was young; it was fun but I didn't realize the 'snap' was a fiendish plan to insure that no bee escapes without carrying pollen!

On Point today featured former Romney colleague Ed Conard. I hope Conard keeps making the same points in lots of different forums. He's showing the Satanic claws of the vulture more clearly and purely than Romney does.

Looks like most of the online commenters didn't see it this way; they're chastising host Tom for failing to fight back. I felt the same way at the start. Even thought about calling in and saying "Hey Tom! You're missing a chance to improve the world by killing this bastard!" But after a while I realized Conard was doing a beautiful job of killing his own side. He's advocating raw unsheathed Rand: the super-rich deserve to get richer because they're superior, and everyone else deserves to starve because we're LOSERS LOSERS LOSERS NYAH NYAH NYAH.So it's time for another episode of Misteromney's Neighborhood:

Spokane isn't highly air-conditioned. In this neighborhood, maybe 1/8 of all houses have window units, and 1/20 have central.

Only a few have window units mounted through the wall. This was a fairly common technique in the '50s, when air conditioners (like all other appliances!) were built to be repaired. You could leave the casing in the wall and pull out the innards to fix the fan or recharge the Freon. It's impractical with more recent ACs, which are (like all other appliances!) unrepairable and unrechargeable thanks to the replacement of nontoxic CFC by poisonous HFC. Now you'd have to take out the whole casing and replace it with a new unit that may not fit the same opening.

In Kansas and Okla the wall-mounted units were always placed up high, around eye level. This makes sense: cold air drops, so a high AC has a better chance of 'throwing the cool' across the room. Also has a better chance of blowing over chairs and tables.

Here in Spokane, the few wall-mounts I've seen are down low, around knee level. I don't know why you'd do it that way.

One of these down-low units makes even less sense.

The hole is much larger than the cooler, and is about 3 degrees off perpendicular. It's not sloppy. The metal siding was carefully cut in a perfect (but slanted) rectangle; the plywood is perfectly aligned with the slanted opening, and the cooler is perfectly square with the plywood.

I can't figure out how this happened. If you accidentally make one off-perp cut in a wall, you correct it before making any other cuts. You don't carefully measure the other three sides to match the first one. That would be harder than cutting straight!

Most of the Experts seem to agree that EU is going to let Greece cut loose from the rigidly coupled monetary monstrosity.

My first thought was "Good, by fucking god! The others will then see that independence is POSSIBLE!"

But then I thought specifically about Greece. Its gov't has been incompetent through most of modern history, and shows no signs of competence now. After independence it will most likely dissolve into chaos. Independence won't do Greece any good.

The EU dictators will then be able to point to Greece as a "moral" lesson when other countries try to assert any small scrap of independent thinking.

"See what happened to Greece? You don't want that to happen to you! Just close your mouth and open your ass."

NPR interviews Rafe Sagarin on his new book 'Learning from the Octopus'. Sagarin is trying to bring back the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO DO THINGS, within a limited sphere, using a rather odd example.

It's not clear why the octopus deserves to be treated as the best case of decentralized control; ALL OF NATURE is made that way. From the mitochondrion to the DNA-repair mechanism to the cell membrane to the tissue to the organ to the organism to the ecosystem to the whole fucking biosphere, EVERY SINGLE PIECE runs on an infinite number of negative feedback loops, and EVERY SINGLE RELATIONSHIP is loosely coupled.

I suppose I should be glad that Sagarin, who seems to have access to power, is pushing this natural idea. It's clearly alien to all modern Western governments, who have completely forgotten how to use feedback, completely forgotten how to decouple. Most Euro governments, including the US, were originally designed with lots of layers, lots of legislative bodies to pick up error signals. America lost its layers in 1861 when psychopathic madman Lincoln locked the whole mess together with bloody rods of steel, and has progressively lost its signal-reading systems ever since, with every illegitimate "decision" by black-robed Soviet agents mandating absolute uniformity with the suicidal norms of inbred cretinous aristocrats.

Most transparent example is the EU. A tightly coupled machine with total top-down regulation, and it's blowing up specifically because of the tight coupling.

Or look at the Carbon Cult for a double example. Pushed by the EU in strictly top-down form, the Cult attempts to lock all countries and businesses into a death spiral of steady decline, forbidding normal adaptation to circumstances, forbidding normal innovation. And why is this lockdown supposedly necessary? Because of an insanely wild pseudotheory that invalidly assumes the climate is a tightly coupled global system using positive feedback.

Again, I'm halfway glad to see Sagarin's formulation getting air time but I'm mostly frustrated. Some of us have been hammering this point for a long long long long long long long long long long LONG time.

British idiot authorities have announced in advance that they're going to use a loud noise weapon to disperse possibly unruly crowds at the Olympic event.

Defending yourself is dead easy.

Good earplugs are all you need. Flents "Quiet Please" brand is widely available and highly effective. Practice in advance to get the insertion right.... there's more to it than simply stuffing the plugs in. When it's right you'll know it: lots of discomfort and zero sound. (The E-A-R brand is marketed as 'professional'; more expensive but no better than Flents.)

Both of the rosebushes by my front porch are getting ready to bloom. I'm watching for the pop, and the bees are also watching. They hover near the buds impatiently, saying "Come on! We want color! We want smell! We want nectar!" The smaller bees actually stand on the protruding tip of the bud, looking down at the place where the red will appear.

How do they know? The buds are small and tightly closed, won't be popping for a week or so. Each bud is the same color as the leaves, and doesn't have a smell that my dull hominid nose can detect. Is it emitting some sort of pre-bloom note? A flower promo? "Coming soon! Don't miss the excitement! And be sure to pick up your free pollen gift!"

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Later update: Most likely an electrostatic charge signal. It's becoming obvious that bees do a large part of their sensing and communicating by capacitive methods.

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Another local note: The neighborhood feels like a distinctly old-fashioned place this year. Kids are playing outside till the sun goes down, with some adult supervision. They're clearly getting lots of exercise and sun, and they're looking less like bloated South Park characters than they did when I first came here in 1990. Seems to be a generally healthy trend. Recessionary influence? Less focus on fantasy and future, more focus on enjoying reality?

Not a bit surprised to hear that Vulture Romney, who enjoys tearing companies apart and forcing their employees into poverty, had a sadistic streak as a youngster.

One thing strikes me as interesting. In the parts of the world and culture where I grew up, homosexuality was basically a non-concept in 1965. We knew who was 'that way', and it just didn't matter. No big deal, because the males who were 'that way' didn't make it a big deal. Unlike now, they didn't force their preferences on the rest of us via TV, newspapers, Facebook, etc.

There was plenty of bullying and teasing, but it was purely about position in hierarchy. If A was higher than B, A teased B. Normal part of growing up for any social mammal. B had to learn how to deal with it, either by rising in the hierarchy or by finding positive elements in life outside the bullying situation.

It appears that Romney's world was different. In his super-rich super-liberal Yankee boarding school, sexual orientation was a big deal, and it was a major part of the bullying relationship.

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Parallel to what I'd noticed before about male/female hierarchy. In "unenlightened redneck yahoo" Oklahoma in 1965, women and men filled pretty much the same roles. Frontier tradition. Women fixed cars, owned businesses, and moved around freely, without losing their female appearance and style. They didn't turn into swaggering crewcut monsters. No big deal.

When I moved to Penn State in 1986, I saw a very different world. In that "enlightened progressive" part of the world, women stayed home and expected to be sheltered and supported; and the most Progressive male PSU faculty members openly expressed a bizarre sort of contempt toward women. Those tenured Commies, while forcing everyone else to conform to their egalitarian dictates, made it clear that they didn't think women should be working anywhere near them.

U.S. stock futures fell as investors assessed a disclosure by JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, that it had a $2 billion trading loss after positions in credit securities [i.e. BETS] proved riskier than expected.

JPMorgan tumbled 6.7 percent after the close of regular trading as Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said the bank made egregious mistakes and that trading losses were “self inflicted.” Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. (C), Goldman Sachs (GS) Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley (MS) lost at least 2.3 percent.

EAT IT, DICKHEADS!MORE! MORE! MORE!We know how to solve the problem. We've done it before in 1936. But with government firmly controlled by the Wall Street Mafia, no valid solutions can be expected. So the only way out is for the "self-regulating" bankers to collapse entirely.

Best part: No taxpayer money was lost. Rich fuckheads losing money that belongs to other rich fuckheads. No humans were harmed.

When brand-R commentators yap about Takers and Makers, I always feel a slight and totally unjustified twinge of guilt. In fact I'm pure Maker (until yesterday...) but my income runs on a royalty basis from sales of courseware. During the years when I'm not currently working, I feel guilty without any logical reason. Stored labor is morally and economically the same as current labor, but it doesn't feel the same.

Now I can feel like a Maker again. Publisher got around to starting the beta process on latest revision yesterday, so I'm back in the saddle again with current work to do. After this brief bit of debugging is done, I'll start two years of solid work on a brand-new project, so there won't be much time for grousing and musing.

Also yesterday, my first Social Security payment magically popped into the bank, so I'm now a Taker AND a Maker. This SS check was meant to be the destination of the plan I hatched in 1990. I had initially assumed that the years between cessation of regular work and starting SS would be a tightrope walk, requiring more than a little bit of luck; and I assumed that the start of SS would bring great relief from the white-knuckled decade. In fact, lean living and frugality led to security after a couple years. Now I could get along without any income for the next ten years, so it turns out that starting SS at 62 wasn't necessary financially.

It was necessary emotionally, as the only form of revenge that an Unacceptable critter can get away with. After 62 years of being raped and shat on and spat on by the Cool People, the Beautiful People, the Governing People, this is a little bit of payback.

As the saying goes: it's not the money, it's the principle of the thing ... or more precisely, it's the interest of the thing. This makes up for the interest that Bugsy Bernanke and his Jew Mafia are stealing from my savings account.

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.com, says in the land of Internet entrepreneurs, hoodies are actually a status symbol.

"Most of your time is spent just completely at the computer, doesn't matter what you show up to work in. I think Zuckerberg was accurately representing what the culture of Facebook is."

Yet it was only a few months ago that the same cozy outerware[sic] had a very different meaning, after the shooting of a teenage boy named Trayvon Martin, who was wearing a hoodie. Thenjiwe[sic] Tameika[sic] McHarris is an organizer with the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice.

"When black boys wear hoodies, they are identified with criminal activity -- whereas the Mark Zuckerbergs, they look comfortable. And so what does that communicate about the politics of race and class in America?

"You know, Mark Zuckerberg has adopted the uniform at a sort of disadvantage. He's already a tremendous target because of his wealth, so his disinclination to telegraph that wealth through his clothes is very understandable."

Nice try at the standard Orwellian reversal, but completely false.

In fact the hoodie has exactly the same meaning for Trayvon and Mark.

It means "I'm supercool. I'm superpowerful. I'm at the absolute top of the status stack. Mere mortals bow down when I enter their neighborhood. Any Untouchable (e.g. white, Southerner, Christian) who fails to bow shall be mowed down by the brute force of the Culture and the Law."

There is, however, a difference in level of abstraction between the Trayvon hoodie and the Mark hoodie.

For Trayvon and his colleagues, power comes directly from the barrel of a gun, from an instant readiness to shoot, stab and rob anything that gets in their way.

For Zuckerberg and his colleagues, power is more abstract but vastly more overwhelming. Zuckerberg and friends have the direct and total power to write all of our cultural laws through Facebook, Hollywood and TV; and they can buy any economic law they need from CongressMart. Supply and demand not giving us enough quadrillions this week? Buy a revised version.

Scientists say climate change is making it tougher for Idaho reservoir managers to forecast weather, control floods and manage water for farming, recreation and fisheries.

Future challenges were foreshadowed recently, when two days of record high temperatures, accompanied by record rainfall in the same week, pushed a surge of water in the Boise River. ... Ron Abramovich, of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, says this phenomenon — a warm spring, heavier rains and more unpredictability — is all something to expect more of as the climate changes.

Well, let's see. Warm spring?

Nope. Decisive downward trend.

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Wetter spring?

Nope. No particular trend.

On the question of "predictability", the last few years are certainly up-and-downish, but there was an similar period around 1910, roughly the same mean and same variance. 1910 was well before Evil Carbon was created out of Dark Matter. The 1910 species of carbon was just another old element, so it can't be blamed for that period of wet variability. (Unless Evil Carbon has the Superpower of reaching backward in time and changing the records of previous periods.... No, it's the Carbon Cult "scientists" who have that superpower, not Evil Carbon.)

As usual, disproved in one minute from the hugely valuable NCDC graphs.

The nine men from Rochdale were yesterday convicted of abusing five vulnerable teenagers after plying them with alcohol, food and small sums of money in return for sex. However, the true number of victims, who were "passed around" by the gang, is likely to be nearer to 50, police have admitted.

Perfectly normal in the Die-Verse World. Cool people (i.e. nonwhite people) get away with huge crimes for many years, while uncool whites would have been caught and punished instantly. But this situation also reveals an outer layer of cool/uncool, a contrast we rarely get to see because cool people rarely speak truth.

Complaints to social workers and the police were ignored because they were "petrified of being called racist", former Labour MP for Keighley Ann Cryer said. Mrs Cryer, who has campaigned to bring the issue of Asian sex gangs to light, said the girls had been "betrayed" and condemned to "untold misery" by the police and social services. "This is an absolute scandal. They were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness," she said.

It can be reported that the trial was delayed by two weeks when two Asian barristers quit the case due to intimidation by far right groups outside Liverpool Crown Court. ... And a tweet from BNP leader Nick Griffin almost caused the trial to collapse when it led to allegations of the jury having a "far-right bias".

Normally the truth is only spoken by uncools, and we can see that here in standard form. Doubleplusuncool BNP stated the facts, and the trial nearly "collapsed" because truth carried by uncools is "right-wing bias" and "intimidation". But here, uniquely, we have a doublepluscool female Labor MP, descended from an impeccable Commie heritage, who is also speaking the truth. She can be heard by the "legal" system and by the newspapers, because she's cool.

PTC offers a 2.1 cent per kilowatt hour tax write-off for wind energy production that effectively exempts much of the industry from federal income tax. By contrast, the oil and gas companies whose tax rates Mr. Obama keeps complaining about pay some $26 billion a year in federal and state corporate income taxes.

Now the PTC is scheduled to expire, and the industry is launching a lobbying blitz to extend it for another four years. Several GOP Governors are already on board, including South Dakota's Dennis Daugaard, who also wants an investment tax credit for wind.

Enter [Comrades] Reichert and King. [Comrade] Reichert is co-sponsoring legislation to extend the PTC because the subsidies "reduce electricity costs and create jobs." As for [Comrade] King, who likes to advertise himself as a principled conservative, his line is that "Iowa is a wind energy success story" that only needs the federal government to "provide stable, low tax rates."

Business as usual. You thought we were going to do something sensible or useful? Ha. Fool. Gotcha again.

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Polistra is praying to Allah, or to whatever gods still exist. Bring this former nation to its knees fast. Take it down. Total bankruptcy. That's the only way common sense will prevail, after ALL the money has gone to China, after ALL other expenditures have been cancelled.

Fire crews were dispatched to a second alarm fire in a duplex ... When firefighters arrived, flames were coming out of the windows of one of the apartments.

The fire started in the area of a space heater in the first apartment. Fire officials say the residents in the home had put a thick blanket in a washing machine, causing it to overflow. The residents then used the space heater to dry their home out. The wet blanket was too close to the space heater and caught fire.

Well, at least the blanket is dry now.

More seriously, this is why I was so happy to get into a purchased house after 20 years of suffering in apartments and duplexes. In an apartment your safety is beyond your own control. No matter how careful you are, one misused heater or unquenched barbecue can kill you. In a house your only risk is from your own stupidity, which means caution is rewarded.

There isn't a word for the opposite of an aptronym... Nevertheless, you can't beat the name of a witness in the John Edwards mess.

Bunny Mellon, the 101-year-old superrich Communist lady who was supporting Edwards's campaign. No! That's not right! Bunny Mellons should be the mistress!

= = = = =

As usual nobody is asking the real question.

Loyal Party apparatchiks do not get in trouble for misusing money, or for affairs, or for any violation of written laws. That's exactly why people become Party apparatchiks. The fact that Edwards is facing this absurdly legalistic trial tells us that he was disloyal. It tells us that he offended a more important member of the Politburo. Who was offended and how? That's the real question.

Heartland got into hot water with a billboard campaign associating Gaia with Ted Kaczynski.

Seems to be outraging several people on our side, so I can see why they cancelled it quickly.

Must admit, though, I don't feel the outrage.

I get outraged at murderous lies, such as the genocidal pseudoscience of "global warming" or "economics" or "sociology". Anyone who abuses science to impoverish or kill ordinary people pisses me off. (To put it mildly.**)

I'm not outraged by a mis-aimed advertisement like this one. To my eyes, the problem is just a bad analogy and improper class connections. Kaczynski wasn't aligned with the modern Gaians; he was more like an old-fashioned Luddite. He lived in extreme poverty, while modern Gaians are rich investors and politicians who zoom around the world in private Gulfstreams. Ted murdered dozens, while modern Gaians murder millions. He's not in their class at all.

If you want a shocking visual that relates more directly to the facts: An Indonesian farmer who starved when biofuel investors kicked him off his land. Or an old British widow frozen in her flat because wind "turbines" and carbon taxes made electricity unaffordable.

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** HERE, BY FUCKING GOD. I'LL PUT IT LESS MILDLY.

THIS IS A WAR.

THE GAIANS STARTED THIS WAR IN 1975.

SINCE THEN, THE GAIANS HAVE WASTED TRILLIONS OF OUR MONEY.

SINCE THEN, THE GAIANS HAVE KILLED THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT CIVILIANS.

THE GAIANS OUGHT TO BE FUCKING GRATEFUL THAT THE SCIENTIFIC SIDEHAS NOT CHOSEN TO FIGHT BACK.

WHY HASN'T THE TRUTHFUL SIDE FOUGHT BACK?

BECAUSE TRUTH IS NOT COOL. TRUTH IS NOT HIGH-STATUS.TRUTH IS NOT RICH.

UNLIKE THE GENOCIDAL GAIAN WACKOS, WE ARE NOT IMMUNE FROM PUNISHMENT.

IF WE STARTED TO WASTE TRILLIONS OR KILL CIVILIANS, WE'D BE WIPEDOUT IN A PICOSECOND, AND THE WAR WOULD BE OVER.

In this morning's news we see a perfect distinction between the Idiot Bush way of handling "terrorism" vs the Not-Quite-Idiot Obama way of handling "terrorism".

On one side we have the bizarre circus of "legal process" involving KSM and his associates. Pure Bush. All process, no reality. Yeah, I know the shared lie about Bush being a "cowboy". I know that Ds hate Bush because he's a "cowboy" and Rs love Bush because he's a "cowboy". As always, they're both wrong. Bush insisted on grinding everything through the courts, and we're seeing where that leads.

Any time you put anything in the hands of lawyers, civilization collapses.

On the other side we see the Obama approach used on a "terrorist" of similar vintage. An al-Qaeda leader connected with the USS Cole attack was taken out neatly and cleanly. No circus, no lawyers, no chance for histrionic propaganda. He's just dead.

BBC is giving a quick rundown on likely consequences of yesterday's Euro elections.

"The markets" don't like the disorganized result in Greece, which normally would mean it's a good result for the people of Greece. This time may be different. Considering that Greece has been a Goldman dependency since last year, chaos may in fact be Goldman's predestined outcome. More chaos means more profit opportunity for speculators and less money for ordinary investors and ordinary people. Goldman's goal fulfilled.

France looks more like a definite improvement. BBC is focusing on Hollande's readiness to make life hard for rich people, which may cause some rich dickheads to leave. A good thing for France, but not really the main point.

Sarkozy was pushing to make France more like post-1980 America, pushing to eliminate French industrial policy and protections for workers. Terrible ideas. France was doing the right thing in this area; its protected workers are plenty productive. Sounds like Hollande will at least stop pushing Americanization. He's also trying to declare independence from Germany, which is definitely good.

... the US has been arming Bahrain’s monarchy against peaceful demonstrators.

Hmm. I guess dictatorial regimes are Young Democracies when we say so, and Evil Dictators Who Need To Be Overthrown when we say so.

I don't have any problem with a major power using money, economic tactics and propaganda to enforce its preferences. That's foreign policy. Decide who's likely to be a useful friend and who's likely to oppose our interests; support the friends and make life difficult for the enemies. Normal and necessary for a big nation.

I do have a huge problem with the Orwellian nonsense about "Human Rights", which gives a completely illegitimate "moral" and "religious" flavor to these practical decisions.
When you move these decisions into the "religious" realm, you have to start wars to change the habits of "immoral" nations. You kill thousands of Afghans and Iraqis to bring the alleged benefits of Feminism and Critical Queer Studies to the "primitive" "savages" who persisted in following the old rules for civilization. These self-destructive wars do not actually bring our insane suicidal "morality" to the "primitive" country; they only leave permanent death and destruction and create permanent hatreds.
When you play the "moral" game, nobody believes or trusts anything you do, because each shift of allegiance suddenly becomes the new "universal moral rule" to be enforced with bombs everywhere.

We didn't always play this game. Between Wilson and JFK our politicians and media described our maneuvering in strictly practical and commercial terms, and our maneuvering was only rarely lethal. Our foreign policy was trustworthy and credible because it didn't claim Divine Authority.

In discussing the ascendancy of the VW, author Paul Ingrassia makes an excellent contrast: the Beetle was a "good car for poor people", but only rich people and hippies liked it. Poor people want to look rich; only the old established rich like to look poor.

Good sociology, and a level of candor about rich and poor that we rarely hear on the air.

But it doesn't apply to VW. The Beetle was completely inappropriate for poor Americans. It required a Teutonic level of precise maintenance and precise driving; parts were fairly expensive; repairs needed special tools; a minor collision could destroy it and kill you; gas mileage was no better than a Dart or Rambler.

Poor and working-class Americans were vastly better served by a plain-jane Chevy or Ford. A '59 Biscayne with six and stick would take all sorts of abuse. You could forget to change the oil, shift into high at 5 MPH, bump into things, tow trailers, pull treestumps .... and it would keep on going.

In short, poor Americans understood their own needs accurately, and Detroit gave them what they needed.

UK Telegraph runs a basically unnecessary article about halal and kosher slaughter. Presumably the main purpose of the article is to stir some excitement in the comment section, and it succeeded there!

I'm still puzzled by the basic attitude:

Prof Bill Reilly, ex-president of the British Veterinary Association, said cutting the throats of lambs, chickens and other animals without stunning them breaches legal requirements because it causes significant pain, fear and distress.

British and EU law permits the method of religious slaughter to account for Muslim and Jewish dietary practices, but stipulates that the animals must not be caused "unnecessary suffering."

Simple logic: If you're going to kill a critter anyway, the last few seconds of its life are irrelevant. It won't remember those seconds.

You should be worrying instead about how the animal is kept during the two or three years of its life. That's when the meaningful suffering happens. Modern factory farming is in fact unnecessarily cruel.

Same with humans. Satanic "civil" "rights" lawyers are always suing to modify the process of capital punishment. Some states have postponed executions because they didn't have the "correct" kind of anesthetic on hand.

If you're going to kill the man anyway, the last few minutes don't matter. Vastly more important to do the execution soon after arrest, and to do it predictably and certainly. That's how deterrence works. When criminals can see that their crimes will bring quick and certain pain or death, some of them will choose a non-criminal way of life. Criminals are short-term thinkers, and they're good at figuring the odds.

You should be worrying instead about the long suffering of ordinary people who are killed or injured by criminals who know the odds.

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When did this idiotic focus on the last few seconds of life dominate the thinking of post-Christian cultures? It's fairly recent, and it's certainly not a universal part of moral thinking. It hasn't corrupted Islamic societies yet. They remain rational.

On an aptronymic roll this week! Good bit of Schadenfreude here as well, as the Krauts finally come to terms with reality and quietly abandon Green shit.

Germany's federal government needs to prepare for the failure of its plans for the expansion of offshore wind power. "The goals are not attainable under current conditions," said Dirk Briese, managing director of Trend Research.

(Yeah, I know it's not an aptronym in German, but the article is in English.)

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Meanwhile, the suicidal idiocy continues right here in Eastern Wash. Nobody in this totally fucked former "country" has enough fucking sense to slow it down.

Just northwest of the town of Oaksdale in a region known for wind, this project is the latest for First Wind, a Boston-based company with 13 wind projects across the nation. Avista Utilities of Spokane has signed a 30 year agreement with the company to provide power to the immediate region.

No aptronyms on this one, just reagent-quality lunacy. This particular lunacy affects me directly, since my electric rates will rise dramatically to finance the extra natural-gas generation needed to run these hippieshit oh-wow pinwheels. And then to subsidize the remediation projects for the forests that are eaten by bugs because the oh-wow hippie pinwheels are killing all the bats. And then to finance the treasonous teardown of all dams to eliminate all competing sources of genuinely clean energy. And then to finance the teardown of the turbines when the subsidies disappear and the towers start to fall.

With any luck, the whole fucking former "nation" will have collapsed by then.

The story of the blind pro-life activist in China is getting more suspicious and weird by the minute.

First, as I already noted, it's bizarre and weird that we're getting all weeweed up about a pro-life activist in China. Here in the Land Of Liberty And Justice For All Amen, we imprison pro-life activists and throw away the key. Our Satanic "journalists" cheered when Randall Terry was put into jail; now they're cheering because Ching Chong Ching Chong got out of jail. No logic there. Not that I expected any.

Second, I don't buy the story about Ching Chong Ching Chong getting out of super-efficient Chinese house arrest and "jumping over the wall" of our Embassy all on his own. Nope, doesn't wash. Nobody "jumps into" an American embassy compound on his own. The whole event was orchestrated by a governmental entity. Maybe some part of the US gov't didn't realize the State Dept was trying to surrender to China in the same week. Much more likely the Chinese gov't was tired of playing with Ching Chong Ching Chong and wanted to make him our problem from now on.

Third, I don't blame the Chinese gov't for wanting to get rid of Ching etc. He's clearly a game player and manipulator, taking advantage of the situation, milking it for everything he can get. Of course this could also be part of Chinese government tactics. We don't even know that Ching etc is a real dissident in the first place; here in The Land Of Liberty And Justice For All Amen, most leading "dissidents" are CIA plants, so it wouldn't be surprising to find similar phenomena in China.

Good aptronyms, like celebrity deaths, come in threes. After spotting two yesterday, I was hoping for another one. Sure enough!

The nine baby owlets that arrived at WSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital a couple weeks ago – originally thought to be great horned owls – are actually of the screech variety.

The hospital has not seen a baby screech owl for at least 10 years. Due to the hospital’s unfamiliarity with screech owls, workers there reached out to owl experts across the nation for insight about what kind of owlets they had in their custody. The “keen eye” of two bird authorities located in the Midwest caused Nickol Finch, who oversees the hospital’s Raptor Rehabilitation Center, to conclude that they were screeches.

Better pictures here. The owls are certainly cute little critters. They won't be so cute when they grow up to eviscerate mice and squirrels, but that's Nature.

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And another example of a hopelessly cute baby that will grow up to be a fearsome predator. Note how the tiny critter is already able to tune its chromatophores to match the background!

Spokane Police confirmed just before 2 p.m. Thursday that the woman stabbed multiple times in Northeast Spokane died.

Police said around 8:10 a.m. a 55 year old woman was walking her dog, alone on a walking trail near the area of 1800 E. South Riverton. According to the victim’s description of the incident, a man jumped out of the bushes, stabbed her several times and fled. The victim screamed for help and made her way up the street where a nearby construction worker heard her cries, rushed over, administered as much first aid as he could and called 9-1-1.

One construction worker said the woman told him she was having trouble breathing and to take her dog.

The victim was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries and rushed into surgery.

A couple living nearby also rushed to help, and also called 911. The wife told KREM 2 News that earlier this week she ran from a man who "came out of nowhere" while she was walking in the neighborhood.

Witnesses provided a very brief description to police of the suspect as he fled the scene. They described the suspect as a black male with a "crazy eye" wearing a black hoodie and black pants and is in his early to mid 30's.

Detectives have detained a man matching the suspect description given by witnesses and are working to determine if this individual is responsible for the attack.

Well, we know for sure this can't possibly be the criminal. It is an Axiom Of Holy Scripture that black men wearing hoodies are Archangels Of Supreme Goodness And Victims Of Evil Discrimination By Nasty White Pigs.

Two supremely perfect aptronyms in one story. The story was already perfect without the aptronyms!

The corridors of Television Centre often reeked of the class B drug as BBC employees and visiting pop groups regularly smoked joints. On one occasion, Rick Jones and Lionel Morton, presenters of Play School, got stoned before filming the children’s programme, it is claimed.

As well as drugs, the BBC was apparently also a hot bed of sex with staff “bonking all over the place”. Recalling his time on Play School for a BBC documentary, former presenter Johnny Ball revealed that drug use spilt on screen in a nativity scene.

He said: “There was Rick Jones, Lionel Morton and myself. They got stoned on the biggest joint you’ve ever seen — in the studio. “They were absolutely stoned out of their minds.”

Others told how a culture of drug use was effectively tolerated at the BBC.

Via Economic Populist blog: More bad news for universities and good news for PROPER education ... if anyone had the sense to offer PROPER education.

"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."

Excellent advice. Economists and other "experts" should have been giving this advice a long long LONG time ago. It's been true forever.

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."

The number of people signing up for the food assistance program known as EBT Cards has steadily increased the past several years.

Some people in Spokane say their monthly allowance has been drastically cut, forcing them to alternative solutions. KREM2 spoke with several families who say their monthly food allowance has been cut by more than 70%. Tasked with finding other ways to feed themselves, they're using their EBT Cards a little differently.

Now more and more of those families are using their money to buy seeds from the grocery store to grow their own gardens.

Very smart. Note that it didn't happen UNTIL the food stamps were cut. I'm sure it wouldn't happen at all in vibrant communities, but luckily Spokane is only minimally vibrant.

Still more proof that Vulture Romney is fantastically stupid. He hires a fag as a major campaign adviser. Understandable enough given the bubble Vulture lives in. Among supercool superrich superstatus dickheads, it's damn hard to find anyone who isn't an assrammer or carpetmuncher. Sodomy and status are synonymous in modern America.

The stupid part: Vulture doesn't understand how the system works. Repooflican fags are always blackmailed by Democrat fags. Look at what happened to Joe McCarthy. Look at what happened to Larry Craig.

Vulture got lucky this time. The blackmail started early, so his assistant fag (who seems to have vastly more sense and honor than Vulture!) had to get out early.

The ordinance changes the city’s comprehensive plan to include a new map called a “Military Influence Area.” This means zoning in the area would be changed to limit the building heights and sound around Fairchild Air Force Base.

The council says Monday’s vote is a step toward protecting the future of the Air Force base and will primarily restrict any future construction in the surrounding area.

The Spokane Tribe wants to build a casino, hotel and shopping center in the area.

In the modern era of Bets and Debts, every gov't is run by gambling interests. In Western states it's mainly Indian casinos; in Nevada and Jersey it's Italian casinos; and in the national gov't it's the Jew casinos of Wall Street.

Could this rejection of a casino indicate that the Bets and Debts era is starting to fade out? Remains to be seen, but worth watching.

Good fiction writers and good journalists formerly followed the Latin motto Nihil humanum mihi alienum est. In plain English, they had empathy. First of all they understood that PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT. Then they tried to understand the motives of each DIFFERENT character they invented or encountered, without jamming everyone into one mode of thinking. They didn't lose their own values, but they knew that other people functioned with a different set of values and taboos.

Modern writers have lost this talent. They operate on an unexamined pseudologic: (1) All people are identical; (2) Therefore all people are identical to ME.

They are trapped in a solidly uniform echo chamber of extroverted, humorless, infinitely status-seeking personalities. A character who falls outside the model is incomprehensible. This absolute incomprehension manifests itself in two ways.

Sometimes the incomprehensible human is "transparentized", as shown by the perfectly echo-chambered Anna Rose here.

Sometimes the incomprehensible human is killed figuratively or literally. Best example of this is the neocon mentality, as manifested by nearly all commentators and politicians in both "parties". The only set of values is the Gramscian set, which is basically the permanent value system of decadent inbred aristocrats everywhere. Highly social, maximally greedy, sexually promiscuous in all possible directions. Your basic 6-month-old galactic ego. Other values are not just impermissible, they are impossible because EVERY SQUARE INCH OF MY GLORIOUS NAKED INFINITE SELF encompasses the merely finite universe. Noncompliant types (introverts, seriously religious people, humble people) do not exist, and whenever their presence becomes known they can be killed with impunity.

Yet these infinitely narrow elites manage to perceive themselves as wide-ranging explorers of human possibilities, and they do have an impulse to seek variety. How do they square the circle? On the trivial level, by confusing human clothing and equipment with human variation. They certainly explore a wide range of clothing, accessories, tattoos, and hairstyles. On a more serious level, by exploring geography and space. This impulse seems to be exceedingly strong among the journalist species. They love to jet around to various spots, organize expeditions to the Arctic, and support space flight. (Again they assume that everyone shares their own peculiar desires, thus justifying huge taxpayer-funded exploration projects.)

When they encounter those different locations, they often apply the same rule that an old-fashioned journalist would apply to different humans. Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.

For these monsters, nihil alienum applies to strange places but omnis alienum applies to strange people.

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Later: Huxley saw this coming, didn't he? The modern Bernard and Lenina, with their brains jammed full of bad Gramscian theories and bad pseudologic, travel to strange New Mexico. They appreciate and respect the strangeness of the place, until they run into John The Savage whose mindset is beyond their comprehension. John doesn't seek status or money, he observes and experiences the world directly, he doesn't have pneumatic sex with everyone he meets, and he conforms his behavior to an absolute standard.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.